Does Super Boat racing need more safety standards?

After death of star Sarasota racer Joey Gratton, prominent figures inside sport allege lack of regulations has magnified the risks.

TOM BALOGStaff writer

When power boat racers rev their engines for the start of the 2012 Suncoast Super Boat Grand Prix on Sunday, the absence of one of the circuit's former stars will be hard to miss.

Seven-time world champion Joey Gratton, of Sarasota, died Nov. 11 at the Super Boat International World Championships in Key West. He was one of three racers killed in one of the deadliest weekends in offshore powerboat racing history.

Gratton was a popular racer; more than 2,000 people attended his funeral in Sarasota.

But it is how he died that hangs as much over the sport of powerboating racing as the death itself. While crashes are inevitable when boats race at speeds of up to 140 mph across choppy waters, Gratton's death has produced a fissure, with prominent figures inside the sport alleging that a lack of safety standards has greatly magnified the risks.

It was not the crash that killed Gratton, alleges a lawsuit filed against the sport's sanctioning body by Gratton's widow, but poor rescue and medical responses, coordinated by "untrained and unsupervised responders" that caused a "a needless drowning death."

John Carbonell, Super Boat International owner and president, and Brian Haff, one of his chief medical officers, maintain that the powerboat sanctioning body employs the finest safety teams in racing.

"We provide the same level of service we have for the last, what, 15 years," Haff said. "We have the most qualified people in the sport working for SBI, people with 20-plus years experience, a licensed physician and trauma surgeon on the course. Nobody else has got what we've got."

Since the three deaths in Key West, Carbonell said racers are required to file a detailed written plan to SBI on how they plan to escape from their vessel in case of a rollover before each race.

"That has added a little more help to the situation," Carbonell said. "Every race they have to file a plan. We give it to our medical people, then race control has a copy of it."

Charlie Bass has been a medical safety coordinator for two offshore circuits — the Offshore Super Series and Super Boat International. He says there are no uniform standards for raceboat manufacturing, from seatbelts to air systems to windshields, and no set safety standards for boats or even similar training for rescue personnel involved in offshore racing.

Raceboat drivers are not required to be scuba certified, according to Bass, even though they risk being submerged in an overturned vessel.

Bass, a rescue dive instructor for 10 years who has been involved in at least 100 powerboat racing rescues, feels adopting these type of standards would increase the safety of offshore racing.

"Those accidents in Key West haven't changed anything safety-wise in the sport," Bass said. "I can't recall one venue where three people died, and I've been involved in offshore since the 1980s. There's a big hoopla, then it's gone."

"Money and politics" prevent the universal adoption of the safety standards, according to Bass.

"More than anything it's money," he said. "Research is expensive. Everybody says it costs too much. Technology has not kept up with the horsepower.

"Speeds have doubled in the past 25 years, since the mid 1980s. If you can't do 160 mph in the upper classes, where speeds average 160-180 mph, you can't compete."

Offshore powerboat racing has been around since 1911 but only one other time were three racers killed at an event — in the 1987 Offshore World Championships in the United Kingdom. There have been 26 fatalities in its history.

An extreme athlete

Gratton spent a lifetime in extreme sports, first as a renowned motocross racer and then as a powerboat throttleman. He was also an accomplished tennis player who competed in numerous USTA national events.

According to friends he had an infectious personality and a talkative demeanor, the type of guy everyone wanted to be around.

On Nov. 11 of last year, the 59-year-old throttleman was critically injured when the Page Motorsports boat he was in flipped twice at the course's first turn. His partner, Stephen Page, the boat's owner and driver, climbed out through an escape hatch to safety. Rescue divers had to get Gratton out of the boat and he died later at the Ryder Trauma center in Miami.

His widow, Priscella, is represented by St. Petersburg attorney Michael Allweiss, a former chairman of APBA Offshore from 1999- 2003.

"What they had in Key West was incompetent, ill-equipped and insufficient," Allweiss said. "As a result, Joey Gratton is dead. It was a routine rollover. The safety people either panicked or weren't prepared.

"They let the hatch close, the boat sank and trapped him inside and he drowned to death. There is photographic evidence of it."

The race is on

A little more than seven months later, more than 30 drivers and throttlemen are expected to show up for Sunday's race equipped with high-powered boats ready to attack the water.

That competition — and the danger that comes with it — is what draws thousands of spectators to Sarasota beaches.

In offshore powerboat racing there is never a smooth, flat predictable surface, like the asphalt tracks of auto racing.

"Every lap you do, it changes," said Bob Vesper, a 57-year-old racer from New Jersey who was in Key West when Gratton died. "You can go around smooth as anything. The second lap, all of a sudden a 'hole' develops. It's not so much really rough or flat, it's just the constant changing course that plays havoc with you the whole race.

"You try to navigate turns as tight as you can and at the same time, keep up a high rate of speed. Too fast and you're going to flip over, too slow and you get your rear-end kicked."

In addition, Bass says that offshore powerboat racing has a degree of difficulty well beyond that of auto racing.

"In offshore races, the road changes every 10 feet," he said. "Somebody is spraying the windshield with a firehose, there are no windshield wipers.

"One person is driving, another person is doing the gas. There are no brakes and you're doing 150 mph. When you think about that, that's pretty scary."

For Sunday's race, Haff said there will be two helicopters at opposite ends of the Offshore Grand Prix course, with six rescue divers, three in each helicopter, with one medical boat on each turn and five rescue boats inside the course. There will also be a transport boat, staffed with a physician and a nurse to tend to rescued racers after an accident.

Carbonell, who would not comment on Gratton's death, citing the pending litigation, maintains that drivers understand and accept that danger is inherent in racing.

"They sign a waiver saying they can get killed," said Carbonell, who is also the race chairman of the Suncoast Offshore Grand Prix, and was a former offshore racer himself.

"Plenty of other sports have the same thing ... the potential of getting killed," Carbonell said. "Everyone still does it. I raced for 10 years and knew every time I went out there I might not come back."